STADIUM PLAN DETAILED

Chargers present joint-use proposal to state Coastal Commission

The San Diego Chargers on Thursday ramped up the organization’s long-standing opposition to plans to expand the bayfront convention center by detailing an alternative for the team’s long-desired stadium.

On the website
chargers.com, the team said it presented the California Coastal Commission on Thursday with a plan to build a combined football stadium and convention center in downtown San Diego’s East Village.

Mark Fabiani, the Chargers’ special counsel, said in March that the team would eventually unveil a new plan despite others’ support for former Mayor Jerry Sanders’ proposed convention center expansion.

The current proposed $520 million convention center expansion is expected to be considered by the Coastal Commission next month. City and convention officials have said such a plan is needed to attract major conventions to San Diego.

The idea of a combined project has been rejected by backers of the current convention center expansion proposal as not meeting the need for contiguous space for large meetings. A new project would be blocks away from the current convention center.

On the Chargers’ website, Fabiani said that the team and Colony Capital, an international investment and development firm, along with the team’s architectural firm, Populous, decided that the joint-use plan is more cost effective and environmentally sensitive than a convention center expansion.

He also said the East Village proposal would improve three San Diego neighborhoods — including the Qualcomm and Sports Arena sites — and improve the city’s tax base.

Fabiani said that when the Chargers presented the East Village proposal to Sanders in 2011, the team was told the city did not have time to consider the idea because the convention center expansion project was too far along and both the courts and the Coastal Commission would quickly approve it.

“Of course, that’s not at all what happened,” Fabiani wrote on the website. “Here we are two years later, and there has yet to be a single hearing before the Coastal Commission. Meanwhile, the taxing mechanism being proposed to pay for the expansion is hung up in court — with perhaps years of appeals ahead.”

Fabiani said that the Chargers believe the alternate plan is “both simpler and more certain.”